Zero Audio?

Around a year ago I first tried making a music streamer from my original Raspberry Pi, a digital converter board from Audiophonics and Volumio. Apart from my unfamiliarity with Linux causing some confusion, it actually worked well and it caused me to have a bit of a mindset change. Originally I wanted to have my music stored locally on a harddrive on the playing device (a MacMini with Amarra), but since the NAS I use for redundant backup of files is just sitting there anyway, streaming was suddenly a viable option. Since then I have been happily using a RPi 3 and cheap digital converter board from ebay as a streamer to feed my Arcam DAC, switching between Volumio and Runeaudio for the software-part.

I am mostly happy with this setup, but since the RPi Zero came out a while ago I’d wanted to try using that for something similar and take advantage of the compact size. To match the Zero I bought a “TinyToslink” adapter to give the Zero an optical output to feed my DAC. It seems to work well, but it’s a bit surprising – in a good way – that something less than half the size of a credit card (excluding all the necessary adapters of course 😀 ) produces sound like this.

I have some ideas for how to case this to make it pretty, but it’s going to take a while as it’s not a priority right now. Also, the TinyTOSlink is not as sophisticated as e.g. the Hifiberry Digi+ Pro (which I have my eye on as well), and there are a few things that could be better. One of the problems is that it doesn’t do 192 kHz over optical (and my DAC will not accept that either), so I have been wondering about DIY’ing a version with transformer-isolated coax out instead – maybe later ;).

I’ll probably continue experimenting a little with the Zero and leave the RPi3 in my main system, but if you want to get a cheap streamer together the Pi – regardless of format – is a good option. And it can of course also do many other things as well (especially if you can be bothered to learn some basic Linux, which I can’t right now 😀 )